Towards developing a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy for supporting pre-implementation activities in business

Effectively preparing and planning for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy is critical to CRM implementation success. A lack of a common and systematic way to implement CRM means that focus must be placed on the pre-implementation stage to ensure chance of success. Although existing CRM implementation approaches evidence the need to concentrate mostly on the pre-implementation stage, they fail to address some key issues, which raises the need for a generic framework that address CRM strategy analysis. This paper proposes a framework to support effective CRM pre-implementation strategy development.

The role of the Hellenic food safety authority in Greece: implementation strategies

During the last 15 years, a series of food scares and crises (BSE, dioxin. foot and mouth disease) have seriously under-mined public confidence in food producers and operators and their capacity to produce safe food. As a result, food safety has become a top priority of the European legislative authorities and systems of national food control have been tightened up and have included the establishment of the European Food Safety Authority. In Greece a law creating the Hellenic Food Safety Authority has been approved. The main objectives of this Authority are to promote the food security to consumers and inform them of any changes or any development in the food and health sector. The paper reviews the general structure of the current food control system in Greece. It describes the structure and the mission of the Hellenic Food Safety Authority and explains the strategy to carry out inspections and the analysis of the preliminary results of such inspections. Details are also given of the personnel training and certification and accreditation standards to be met by the Authority by the end of 2004. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Striving for inclusive design in the built environment: learning strategy adopted by policy implementers at local authorities in England

The research will explore views on inclusive design policy implementation and learning strategy used in practice by Local Authorities’ planning, building control and policy departments in England. It reports emerging research findings. The research aim was developed from an extensive literature review, and informed by a pilot study with relevant Local Authority departments. The pilot study highlighted gaps within the process of policy implementation, a lack of awareness of the process and flaws in the design guidance policy. This has helped inform the development of a robust research design using both a survey and semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire targeted key employees within Local Authorities designed to establish how employees learn about inclusive design policy and to determine their views on current approaches of inclusive design policy implementation adopted by their Local Authorities. The questionnaire produces 117 responses. Interestingly approximately 9 out of 129 Local Authorities approached claimed that they were unable to participate either because an inclusive design policy was not adopted or they were faced with a high workload and thus unable to take part. An emerging finding is a lack of understanding of inclusive design problems, which may lead to problem with inclusive design policy implementation, and thus adversely affect how the built environment can be experienced. There is a strong indication from the survey respondents indicating that they are most likely to learn about inclusive design from policy guides produced by their Local Authorities and from their colleagues.

Sharing power? Prospects for a U.S. concert-balance strategy

The Pax Americana and the grand strategy of hegemony (or “Primacy”) that underpins it may be becoming unsustainable. Particularly in the wake of exhausting wars, the Global Financial Crisis, and the shift of wealth from West to East, it may no longer be possible or prudent for the United States to act as the unipolar sheriff or guardian of a world order. But how viable are the alternatives, and what difficulties will these alternatives entail in their design and execution? This analysis offers a sympathetic but critical analysis of alternative U.S. National Security Strategies of “retrenchment” that critics of American diplomacy offer. In these strategies, the United States would anticipate the coming of a more multipolar world and organize its behavior around the dual principles of “concert” and “balance,” seeking a collaborative relationship with other great powers, while being prepared to counterbalance any hostile aggressor that threatens world order. The proponents of such strategies argue that by scaling back its global military presence and its commitments, the United States can trade prestige for security, shift burdens, and attain a more free hand. To support this theory, they often look to the 19th-century concert of Europe as a model of a successful security regime and to general theories about the natural balancing behavior of states. This monograph examines this precedent and measures its usefulness for contemporary statecraft to identify how great power concerts are sustained and how they break down. The project also applies competing theories to how states might behave if world politics are in transition: Will they balance, bandwagon, or hedge? This demonstrates the multiple possible futures that could shape and be shaped by a new strategy. viii A new strategy based on an acceptance of multipolarity and the limits of power is prudent. There is scope for such a shift. The convergence of several trends—including transnational problems needing collaborative efforts, the military advantages of defenders, the reluctance of states to engage in unbridled competition, and hegemony fatigue among the American people—means that an opportunity exists internationally and at home for a shift to a new strategy. But a Concert-Balance strategy will still need to deal with several potential dilemmas. These include the difficulty of reconciling competitive balancing with cooperative concerts, the limits of balancing without a forward-reaching onshore military capability, possible unanticipated consequences such as a rise in regional power competition or the emergence of blocs (such as a Chinese East Asia or an Iranian Gulf), and the challenge of sustaining domestic political support for a strategy that voluntarily abdicates world leadership. These difficulties can be mitigated, but they must be met with pragmatic and gradual implementation as well as elegant theorizing and the need to avoid swapping one ironclad, doctrinaire grand strategy for another.

An “A-train” strategy for quantifying direct climate forcing by anthropogenic aerosols

This document outlines a practical strategy for achieving an observationally based quantification of direct climate forcing by anthropogenic aerosols. The strategy involves a four-step program for shifting the current assumption-laden estimates to an increasingly empirical basis using satellite observations coordinated with suborbital remote and in situ measurements and with chemical transport models. Conceptually, the problem is framed as a need for complete global mapping of four parameters: clear-sky aerosol optical depth δ, radiative efficiency per unit optical depth E, fine-mode fraction of optical depth ff, and the anthropogenic fraction of the fine mode faf. The first three parameters can be retrieved from satellites, but correlative, suborbital measurements are required for quantifying the aerosol properties that control E, for validating the retrieval of ff, and for partitioning fine-mode δ between natural and anthropogenic components. The satellite focus is on the “A-Train,” a constellation of six spacecraft that will fly in formation from about 2005 to 2008. Key satellite instruments for this report are the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) radiometers on Aqua, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) radiometer on Aura, the Polarization and Directionality of Earth's Reflectances (POLDER) polarimeter on the Polarization and Anistropy of Reflectances for Atmospheric Sciences Coupled with Observations from a Lidar (PARASOL), and the Cloud and Aerosol Lider with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) lidar on the Cloud–Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO). This strategy is offered as an initial framework—subject to improvement over time—for scientists around the world to participate in the A-Train opportunity. It is a specific implementation of the Progressive Aerosol Retrieval and Assimilation Global Observing Network (PARAGON) program, presented earlier in this journal, which identified the integration of diverse data as the central challenge to progress in quantifying global-scale aerosol effects. By designing a strategy around this need for integration, we develop recommendations for both satellite data interpretation and correlative suborbital activities that represent, in many respects, departures from current practice

Scoping customer relationship management strategy in HEI - Understanding steps towards alignment of customer and management needs

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are complex organisations, offering a wide range of services, which involve a multiplicity of customers, stakeholders and service providers; both in terms of type and number. Satisfying a diverse set of customer groups is complex, and requires development of strategic Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This paper contributes to the HEI area, by proposing an approach that scopes CRM strategy, allowing us a better understanding CRM implementation in Higher Education Institutions; maximising alignment of customer and management desires, expectation and needs.

Stay calm! Regulating emotional responses by implementation intentions: assessing the impact on physiological and subjective arousal

Implementation intention (IMP) has recently been highlighted as an effective emotion regulatory strategy (Schweiger Gallo et al., 2009). Most studies examining the effectiveness of IMPs to regulate emotion have relied on self-report measures of emotional change. In two studies we employed electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate (HR) in addition to arousal ratings (AR) to assess the impact of an IMP on emotional responses. In Study 1, 60 participants viewed neutral and two types of negative pictures (weapon vs. non-weapon) under the IMP “If I see a weapon, then I will stay calm and relaxed!” or no self-regulatory instructions (Control). In Study 2, additionally to the Control and IMP conditions, participants completed the picture task either under goal intention (GI) to stay calm and relaxed or warning instructions highlighting that some pictures contain weapons. In both studies, participants showed lower EDA, reduced HR deceleration and lower AR to the weapon pictures compared to the non-weapon pictures. In Study 2, the IMP was associated with lower EDA compared to the GI condition for the weapon pictures, but not compared to the weapon pictures in the Warning condition. AR were lower for IMP compared to GI and Warning conditions for the weapon pictures.